One conventional and typical way in which biscuits, cookies and the like are packaged and sold involves the use of tray-like containers adapted to hold the biscuits etc. in aligned rows, the whole tray plus the biscuits being enclosed within a sealed outer bag which contains the name of the product and other indicia. Normally, the bag is of opaque paper or metallized paper and snugly surrounds the box, thus maintaining the biscuits etc. in the troughs or pockets.
The conventional bag-tray arrangement suffers from two disadvantages. Firstly, most biscuits or cookies are rounded or oval, which means that the pockets defined by the tray or container are likewise rounded. When one of these rounded trays is utilized, the roundedness at one end of the container (the end that is at the bottom of the bag) causes the bag to fold or crumble so that it falls over backwards. This means that the bags cannot reliably be positioned on the store shelves. Secondly, the cookies or biscuits in the lowermost row often become broken or chipped due to impact against the bottom end of the bag, resulting in customer dissatisfaction and an unacceptable product.
An important consideration in the manufacture of trays of the kind under consideration is that they be readily blow- or vacuum-formed from flat stock. Generally speaking, the trays in the prior art which do have a squarish end are too complicated to be reliably blow- or vacuum-formed. One such example is U.S. Pat. No. 3,212,907, issued to Caprioli on Oct. 19, 1965. Other prior art trays achieve stability by deliberately deforming the lowermost pocket or cavity so that it is at right angles to the general extent of the tray. An example is U.S. Pat. No. 3,651,930, issued to K. W. Artz on Mar. 28, 1972. However, the deformed lower pocket puts great stress on the lowermost cookies or biscuits, leading to a high incidence of breakage and customer dissatisfaction.
Other prior patents of interest are the following:
U.S. Pat. No. 4,012,530, issued Mar. 15, 1977 to Holden;
U.S. Pat. No. 3,322,267, filed May 30, 1967 to Weiss;
U.S. Pat. No. 3,740,238, filed June 19, 1973 to Graham.